Is that really you, L.A.?

“The Closer,” an L.A.-based cop show on TNT, debuted two Mondays ago to big basic cable ratings -- just more than 7 million viewers. The drama stars Kyra Sedgwick as Brenda Johnson, a crack interrogator from Atlanta brought in to head the LAPD’s new Priority Murder Squad, so-called because the unit deals with high-profile homicides.

This is not to be confused with the antigang strike team on “The Shield,” the gritty, acclaimed cop show on FX that concluded its fourth season last week, or with the renegade band of L.A. cops and other law-enforcement types on “Wanted,” another TNT drama debuting July 31.

The cops on “Wanted” conduct business from some warehouse-district outpost, from which they light out at all hours to capture L.A.’s 100 most-wanted fugitives, while the cops on “The Shield” work out of the Barn, an ugly, wood-paneled place where everyone’s tipped between bedraggled and enraged, maybe because their work seems to consist of one continuous shakedown of the Latino community.

A staple since “Dragnet,” the L.A.-based cop show increasingly presents the city as generally chaotic and ungovernable, a place where above-the-law sub-units of law enforcement battle bad guys on the streets and budget-conscious bureaucrats back at police headquarters. Some things don’t change; there’s still political infighting and turf wars, but compared to the New York City-based cop shows, the late “NYPD Blue” or “Law and Order,” say, in which crime is dealt with by more recognizable teams of detectives, the L.A. shows are distinctive in the way they have internalized the L.A. sprawl.

Here we get cliques of antihero cops and specialized outsiders, drawn to the City of Angels like men of yore to the Old West. It makes the shows more thrilling in a Hollywood sense -- there’s no limit to the ways you can hunt criminals -- although you wonder if this is yet another way in which the TV version of the city, unlike its incarnation in the best of the true crime novels, is not quite a specific place, with actual neighborhoods and distinguishing features.

This is less true of “The Shield, which came on the air in the aftermath of the scandal that plagued the LAPD’s Rampart division in the late 1990s, than it is of the TNT shows. This Monday on “The Closer” Brenda’s got her hands full with a dead Russian prostitute with a high-end client list. Already, we have seen her solve the shower death of the model wife of a movie star and the bludgeoning of a transsexual high-tech executive. “The Closer” is sordid, but it’s sordid-light, because it also wants to be comedic; practically every scene is underscored with a twangy guitar, like we’re in a movie with an establishing shot in which an alligator crosses the road. “The Closer,” in fact, could be mistaken for “The Client” or the Ashley Judd vehicle “Double Jeopardy,” one of those female-centered crime movies that play easier on the stomach than your given “CSI” episode.

Like Susan Sarandon in “The Client,” Sedgwick, doing her first star turn on TV, gets to wear a Southern accent. But wait, there’s more character development: She lives in a Hyatt and has a secret relationship with junk food. She’s what people who work in cable like to call “a deeply flawed character,” as opposed to the rest of us with our shallow flaws.

It’s an amusing, if credulity-straining, fiction that L.A.’s top homicide investigator is an alternately fierce, cutesy-klutzy, down-home Southern girl who can’t get from point A to point B without pulling over and staring at a Thomas Guide because, as she is given to say: “L.A.’s so beeeeg.”

Yes, it is. About the only L.A. crime that unites this gigantic city is the freeway fugitive, captured fleeing the cops on the local news. That particular brand of street crime has yet to find its TV show equivalent, maybe because it’s too expensive to re-create. Not that the local news doesn’t continue to function as an ongoing cop show, jettisoning actual news for the inherent drama of a perp in flight, news anchors and producers rooting/not rooting for the climactic scene in which the cops surround the vehicle, guns drawn.

Watch freeway chases long enough and you can begin to imagine the Southland as some sort of “Blade Runner”-type place. TV shows, by degrees, are taking on this airborne perspective; when it works, it gives the L.A. cop show a modernist flair. “The Shield,” especially, has its sensibilities tuned to a cop show experience that’s fluid and free-wheeling but also hard and ugly.

“The Closer,” by comparison, is practically as quaint as a Quinn Martin production. Sedgwick’s Johnson would never cross paths with “The Shield’s” Vic Mackey, but they do somehow seem to exist in the same place. “The Closer” has Gil Garcetti, district attorney during the O.J. Simpson trial, as a consulting producer. There’s something very L.A. about this -- former D.A. lives down black eye of his tenure by segueing into work in Hollywood, advising on a show in which high-profile homicides get solved before they can become PR nightmares.